Indirect Grammatical Pressure Driving Language Change

Chapter 36 . Grammatical change

Grammatical change is an extremely interesting area but does presuppose some knowledge of grammar. For this reason, if you do not have this knowledge yet, this chapter will work best if you have first familiarised yourself with the terminology discussed in the chapters on grammar, i.e. especially chapters and 5–8. Chapters on grammatical change in traditional textbooks on the history of English...

Language Production Grammatical Encoding

The processes of language production can be divided into those that create the skeleton of an utterance and those that flesh the skeleton out. In this chapter we are concerned chiefly with the former, a set of processes which we term GRAMMATICAL ENCODING (Levelt, 1989). Grammatical encoding comprises both the selection of appropriate lexical concepts (entries in the speaker's vocabulary) and th...

Grammatical Processing in Language Learners

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (ma...

Grammatical Aspects for Language Descriptions

For the purposes of tool development, computer languages are usually described using context-free grammars with annotations such as semantic actions or pretty-printing instructions. These descriptions are processed by generators which automatically build software, e.g., parsers, pretty-printers and editing support. In many cases the annotations make grammars unreadable, and when generating code...

Address Terms in China: Social Change as a Driving Force for Language Change